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Largest ever family tree shows history of modern and ancient genomes

The research looks at how humans spread across the globe.
Largest ever family tree of humanity
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A new family tree, called the largest-ever, has sequenced data from various population-scale biobanks and ancient samples from across the globe to connect modern and ancient human genomes.

“What I’ve long wanted to do is to be able to represent the totality of what we can learn about human history through this genealogy,” said Gil McVean of the University of Oxford.

According to researchers, revelations in the study suggest our earliest roots as humans were in northeast Africa.

“Humans are all ultimately related to each other,” said McVean.

As humans spread across the globe, a tree of interconnectivity was formed.

From northeast Africa to various islands in what is now known as Asia and the Pacific Islands, human beings continued to explore and spread across Earth.

Researchers found that people appeared to have reached the area now known as Papua New Guinea and the Americas tens of thousands of years before what archeologist records suggest.

There could be other early migrations of humanbeings that are not yetknown.

The researchers wrote in study findings published by Science.org that the foundational belief in the study is that humans are all connected by one ancestral tree.